After trying iPhoto 09 for a few days, I’ve decided to go back to Aperture for several reasons. Although I like iPhoto’s faces & places feature, it’s still missing many of Apertures features. Hopefully faces & places will be added to Aperture 3.

Here are my favorite Aperture features that are missing from iPhoto:

Aperture lets you store your photos outside of the library, even when importing from a camera. Aperture also lets you move your originals at any time after it’s been imported. I like to keep my originals on an external drive to save room. Even with my originals offline, Aperture still lets me see previews and do anything that doesn’t require a high resolution image, such as set desktop or sync with iPod or iPhone.

Aperture gives you a lot more power & flexibility in selecting and organizing photos. You can group similar photos in a stack and view them side by side to choose the best of the group.

Aperture supports editing plugins such as Hydra HDR, which can avoid a trip to Photoshop in many cases.

Aperture gives more options for viewing & editing metadata, including the ability to embed a copyright notice.